A TRIBUTE TO THE LAND-GRANT MOVEMENT
Dr. Jim Cummins has strong feelings about his alma mater and his agricultural heritage. Cummins received his bachelor's degree in agriculture from the UI in 1945. He earned a medical degree from Harvard in 1950 and spent much of his professional life in the Northeast.
Following his retirement as chief of medicine from Boston's Jewish Memorial Hospital in 1994, Cummins had a little more time for trips back home to Olney and to stop by campus to rekindle memories of his student days in Champaign-Urbana.
During one of those visits he told assistant dean Charles Olson, "I've got a message I want to deliver. All I need is an audience!" Last spring's annual initiation banquet for Gamma Sigma Delta, the honor society of agriculture, provided that audience when Cummins spoke on "Our Indebtedness to Justin Smith Morrill."
Cummins's professional achievements are numerous and noteworthy. He conducted the first clinical research on Thorazine, a leading tranquilizer that has allowed many mentally ill patients to live outside mental institutions; he was a faculty member at Harvard Medical School; he worked in the Veterans Administration's outpatient clinic conducting research on aging.
Downplaying his personal achievements, Cummins paid tribute in his speech to the land-grant movement that created institutions like the UI. His research on the life of Justin Smith Morrill (namesake of the Land-Grant Act) was the basis for his talk.
Remembrances of people influential in his UI experience served as Cummins's personal testimony to what the land-grant system means to him.
Charles Olson